Super Fun Salad Spinner Art

Kick off your summer play with awesome STEAM Activities! This cool salad spinner art is very easy to make with just a few simple materials. Combine art with science, and learn about forces. Gather a few simple items for your paint spinner craft and let’s get started!

SALAD SPINNER ART PROJECT FOR STEAM

PAINT SPINNER

Get ready to add this simple STEAM activity to your summer STEM lesson plans this season. If you want to learn more about combining art and science for summer craft and art projects, let’s grab the supplies. While you’re at it, make sure to check out these other fun summer activities.

Our science activities and experiments are designed with you, the parent or teacher, in mind! Easy to set up, quick to do, most activities will take only 15 to 30 minutes to complete and are heaps of fun! Plus, our supplies lists usually contain only free or cheap materials you can source from home!

Click below to get your quick and easy science printables.

SALAD SPINNER ART

Combine a popular kitchen tool and a bit of physics for cool art and science that everyone is sure to love! Take this STEAM activity outside on a nice day!

YOU WILL NEED:

Salad Spinner

Paint

Paper Plates

HOW TO MAKE PAINT SPINNER ART

STEP 1: Place the salad spinner on a flat surface and put a paper plate in the bottom of it. Alternatively, you can cut a piece of paper to fit in the bottom.

STEP 2: Time for the paint! Add drips and drops of paint all around the surface of the paper plate.

STEP 3: When you are satisfied with the amount of paint, close up the salad spinner tightly. Get spinning!

You can check on your masterpiece and see if you need to add more paint. What happens if you thin the paint first with a bit of water. Does changing the viscosity or thickness of the paint have a different effect?

THE SIMPLE PHYSICS OF PAINT SPINNING

Let’s apply Newton’s Laws of Motion to this summer STEAM project with salad spinner art. An object in motion stays in motion unless a force is acted upon it. Our paint spinner is a great example of inertia.

You might be tempted to think that this salad spinner art is also an art project in centrifugal force, but it’s not quite! A salad spinner does use centrifugal force to separate water from the leaves of lettuce. But this STEAM project doesn’t use wet lettuce!

Centrifugal force describes the tendency of an object following a curved path to fly away from the center point. Here the colors on the paper plate are pushed outward when the salad spinner turns, causing the colors to mix together.